Arts & Photography Criticism

Considering the relationship between artists and texts throughout classical antiquity, this study systematically applies new and objective criteria to judge the fidelity between picture and text. It becomes clear that artists illustrate stories, not texts, and Jocelyn Penny Small argues that artistic transmissions follow the model of oral, not textual, transmission where the variant rules and there is no original. Pictures on vases, she demonstrates, should not be used to reconstruct lost literary works.

“Painting is the simplest and most accessible of art forms. Painting can touch anyone, even the most naïve. And even the works of the greatest masters show an essential naïvety and that may be the very thing which makes the painting good. When I say naïvety, I mean the spiritual freshness that some people manage to preserve throughout the whole of their lives.” --Vojislav Stanic
For over half a century the Montenegrin painter Vojislav Stanic has been living and working in the small town of Herceg Novi, observing the lives of its inhabitants from the window of his attic studio with a sharp eye and an impish intelligence. Here, so Stanic claims, is a microcosm of life. One can see universal emotions and traits--love, lust, joy, fear, wonder, jealousy--played out in the parks and cafés of this bustling little port town on the Adriatic. But if many of Stanic’s insights come from keen observation of his neighbors, it is his idiosyncratic outlook and his eye for absurdities and gentle ironies which make his work so compelling. And if he draws on the work of such artists as Bosch, Magritte and de Chirico, it is always with a lightness of touch which leaves one in no doubt that Stanic is a major artistic talent in his own right. This book, including insightful essays which trace his artistic development and explore his uniquely vital imagination, promises to bring his work to the international audience it deserves.

The art criticism of the painter David Humphrey merits an anthology. But neither Humphrey nor Periscope wanted to present his writing as archival documents from 1990 to 2008. We decided it would be more innovative to treat the texts as the starting point for a book that acknowledges and extends the connections between Humphrey's studio practice and his criticism. The outcome is Blind Handshake. It foregrounds the
social life surrounding contemporary art, the practices and gestures, the dialogues and monologues that determine its place in the world. Organized thematically, the book considers Coupling Dramas, Unknowable Others, Collective Solitudes,
Prosthetic Selves, and Good Liars. Artists drawn into the action include Richard Prince, Chris Ofili, Lucien Freud, Mamma Anderson, Tony Oursler, John Currin, Mary Heilmann, Catherine
Murphy, and Amy Sillman.

Painted in 1878, Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine, has been known by a variety of titles and, as Wayne Andersen discovered, has also been altered. Andersen traced these alterations to an art dealer who made them in an effort to render the painting more marketable. His study focuses on the significance of the original state of The Eternal Feminine in an effort to resolve its mysterious importance to Cézanne and, more broadly, the history of art.

Christopher Wilmarth delighted the world with light-filled sculptures of glass and steel that were deeply poetic in their moods and extraordinarily rich in their modernist heritage. But in 1987, at the peak of his career, a long struggle with depression ended tragically for Wilmarth. The internationally acclaimed artist committed suicide at age 44, and his work largely fell from the public view.
Now, Wilmarth's legacy is recaptured in this beautifully written, richly illustrated book by art critic, historian, and poet Steven Henry Madoff. The first in-depth look at Wilmarth's extraordinary life as an artist, the book explores both the light and the darkness that underlie his work. Madoff offers a critical overview of the artist's career, examining the sculptor's response not only to historical masters such as Cézanne, Brancusi, Matisse, and Giacometti, but also to the art world of his times--particularly the dominant influence of Minimalism. Using the newly created Wilmarth archive at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, Madoff anchors this moving interpretation with the sculptor's own writings unearthed from journals, student notebooks, artist sketchbooks, and letters.
Madoff draws as well from interviews, articles, and poems that Wilmarth published in his lifetime, along with the body of criticism covering Wilmarth's development over the years. Acclaimed biographer Nancy Milford contributes a poignant memoir of her years of friendship with the artist, and Fogg associate curator Edward Saywell offers a powerful selection of Wilmarth's writings. The sculptor's romantic outlook, his gorgeously light-infused art, and his dramatic decline into work of harrowing darkness are sensitively examined in a book that reintroduces Christopher Wilmarth's sculptures and graphics to the contemporary art audience.

How to Read a Play is an introductory guide to the art of translating the printed page of a play or screenplay into dramatic mental images; it has been a classic among actors, directors, and writers for the past twenty years. Now fully updated and revised, the book devotes a chapter exclusively to screenplays, noting the intrinsic differences between a screenplay and a playscript and thus bringing this invaluable classic up to date.

In this authoritative and up-to-date study of the painter widely regarded as the father of modern art, Richard Verdi traces the evolution of Cezanne's landscape, still-life and figure compositions, from the turbulently romantic creations of his youth to the visionary masterpieces of his final years. The background of the painter's fluctuating reputation and strained relations with his parents, wife, and close friend Emile Zola, is vividly evoked using excerpts from his own letters and from contemporary accounts of the artist. Concerned both to master the themes of the past, through his copying sessions in Louvre, and to explore the eternal qualities of nature in the countryside of his native Provence, Cezanne sought "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums." "In the tradition of Roger Fry." --The New York Review of Books. 182 illus., 33 in color.